The UK government has decided that it will ban all web sites which depict “unconventional sex”.

Apparently, the UK Conservative government is rather concerned that children visiting porn sites will get the wrong idea about what sex is all about. They believe that it is far better that a panel of ordinary retired army colonels, nuns, monks and, of course, loonies decide what is conventional and what is not.

After all, if you can’t trust the government to tell you what is ordinary sex, who can you trust?

A bill currently being considered would apply the same restrictions to online pornography that currently apply offline.

So, the government thinks that it can block websites that display content that would not normally receive a classification if released on DVD. If a website fails on either of these tests, then a notification of non-compliance will be sent to the site.

It is possible that the guidelines that form the Obscene Publications Act may be used. These refer to sexual acts involving urination, female ejaculation and S&M acts that leave visible marks. Given the huge volume of websites showing porn in its various flavours that are out there, how will it be possible to police, let alone shut down operators?

Those opposed to censorship of the internet say that it is a distraction. While the government is trying to enforce its definition of sexuality, it is wasting resources which should be used to tackle the rise of internet kiddie porn.

Online companies in mainland China have been ordered to put a halt to writing news that isn’t sanctioned by the government.

The ban, announced over the weekend, applies to major online news sources including sohu.com.

The government believes that reporters writing copy in the country cause negative effects on peoples’ minds.

The ban applies not only to online news services but to mobile news services too. Internal news sources can now only report stuff that’s given to them by the Chinese government.

Although there’s never been official sanction for sohu.com nor Tencent to provide independent news, the latest move shows the government is seeking to impose an almost complete black out on the provision of news which hasn’t had a Communist rubber stamp.

The move is intended to consolidate the government’s control of the country by stifling any dissent.

“FindFace,” which uses facial recognition software to match random photographs on Russians social media Vkontakte is finding that their service is being used by puritans to stage witch-hunts against porn stars.

Anti-censorship group Advox said that FindFace has raised privacy concerns since early April, a young artist named Egor Tsvetkov highlighted how invasive the technology can be, photographing random passengers on the St. Petersburg subway and matching the pictures to the individuals’ Vkontakte pages, using FindFace.

At the time Tsvetkov told RuNet Echo, this service could be used by a serial killer or a collector trying to hunt down a debtor. However a bunch of puritans have started to use the service identify and harass Russian women who appear in pornography.

Users of the Russian imageboard “Dvach” launched a campaign to deanonymize actresses who appear in pornography. After identifying these women with FindFace, Dvach users shared archived copies of their Vkontakte pages, and spammed the women’s families and friends with messages informing them about the discovery. The effort also targeted women registered on the website “Intimcity,” which markets prostitution services.

Dvach claim that their doxing campaign is moral outrage, claiming that women in the sex industry are “corrupt and deceptive.” To make matters worse they are the sort of women who dare to ignore Dvach’s target audience.

The group was quickly banned but the case has caused an outcry in Russia. FindFace founder Maxim Perlin said there’s no way he can prevent people from using his service to harass women in this way.

It looks like Apple's hopes to make up some of the cash it is losing to slumping smartphone sales by getting into the entertainment business have been thwarted by Chinese censors.

Apple thought that it could make piles of cash selling its mobile entertainment services in China, however for some reason it thought that the government would welcome an American entertainment network. After all the Chinese always did what Apple told them – a point that the company made the mistake of bragging about during a senate inquiry into encryption recently.

However the Chinese appear to have pulled the plug on Apple's online book and film services. Apple's official spokesman the New York Times said that a a state regulator demanded Apple halt the service. The move came after Beijing introduced regulations in March imposing strict curbs on online publishing, particularly for foreign firms.

Apple said in a statement on Thursday that it hopes to make the services available to customers in China as soon as possible, however it might be a lot trickier than it thinks. It will require a huge change in mindset for the company which would have to submit to government controls and censorship. It is the very thing it bragged to the Senate that it did not allow in China.

Some analysts have muttered that it looks like the Chinese are giving Apple one of their legendary Chinese burns. The company released its book and movie services in China only late last year, leaving Chinese consumers little time to form a habit.

But all this is happening while Chinese customers are walking away from the iPhone. Apple did manage to get its Apple Pay system approved in China, but otherwise the country is seeing its interest in Jobs' Mob slump badly.

Apple is expected to post its first-ever quarterly drop in iPhone sales, to about 50 million units, reflecting a saturated global market and a downturn in China. Wall Street expects adjusted earnings per share to drop 14 percent to $2.00 and revenue to drop 10 percent to $52.0 billion.

Twitter has blocked access to a neo-Nazi account at the request of the German government.

While the rest of the world will be able to see them, Germans will not. It is the first time the social networking site has implemented its local censorship policy, which came into force in January.

It allows it to block content in specific countries if tweets violate local laws. In Germany you are not allowed to push neo-nazi material on account of a bad experience the nation had when it allowed that sort of thing. Announcing the decision, Twitter's general counsel Alex Macgillivray said: "Never want to withhold content; good to have tools to do it narrowly and transparently."

The site belonged to the organisation Besseres Hannover, (Better Hannover), a right-wing extremist group from Lower Saxony. The group has been officially disbanded, its assets are seized and all its accounts in social networks have to be closed immediately. Twitter said that it works with anti-Nazi organisations and would encourage anyone who finds content like this to report it to Facebook.

Members of the group have been charged with inciting racial hatred and creating a criminal organisation. It is also accused of issuing threats against immigrants and distributing racist pamphlets at schools in Lower Saxony.Lately it sent a threatening video to the state's social affairs minister Aygul Ozkan, a German-born conservative politician whose family comes from Turkey.

Senator Amy Klobuchar's fairly blatant attempt to hand over more constitutional powers to her chums in the record companies appears to have backfired after she had ended up taking on the one of the biggest youth icons in the US.

Short of insulting Twilight, Klobuchar has effectively created a law which would have resulted in Justin Bieber being locked up in a prison for singing a song on You Tube.

Now normally any law that involved Justin Bieber being locked up for singing would have gotten our vote, particularly if it could also include Craig David, Celine Dion and James Blunt, but in this case the Bieber has a point.

Bieber became famous by posting videos of his covers of other artists'

songs on YouTube, exposing him to potential prosecution if this legislation passes. He was recently asked what he thought about Klobuchar's proposal, and his answer couldn't have been more dead-on:

"Whoever she is, she needs to know that I'm saying she needs to be locked up - put away in cuffs." He added, "People need to have the freedom... people need to be able to sing songs. I just think that's ridiculous."

Klobuchar's law will actually make it only legal to hum a tune in the presence of witnesses if you pay the RIAA a sum of money.

Needless to day Civil liberties activst groups Demand Progress and Fight for the Future announced that they are teaming up to air an ad that's critical of Senator Amy Klobuchar's (D-MN) Internet censorship legislation, S.978.

It will air on cable news and Comedy Central throughout Minneapolis and Saint Paul at least through this week -- the same week that HR.3261, the House companion to Klobuchar's S.978, is heard before the House Judiciary Committee.

According to Demand Progress executive director David Segal, "We're running this ad for one simple reason: We need to embarrass a key lawmaker to set an example for others, and make it clear that it's not okay to shill for the entertainment industry at the expense of ordinary American's civil liberties." He continued, "Hollywood has gobs of money, and that means that they have undue clout in DC. Lawmakers love sponsoring Hollywood bills because it means untold thousands of new dollars for their campaign coffers. Ads like this will make them think twice."

China's largest technology firms have called for Beijing to increase its censorship of online social media.

Apparently all of China's internet companies and operators have reached a "common agreement" to curb the spread of rumours online, online pornography, internet fraud "and the illegal spread of harmful information on the internet". Beijing is worried about the growth in microblogs, called "weibo" in Chinese and the potential which they have to tear at the seams of government censorship and controls.

But fortunately for them the ISPs have all rallied in support. Of course some of the technology companies have a vested interest in such things. These will be the security companies which have to develop the technology which will sniff out all the “bad stuff”.

But others do not want the Government bringing in rules which will be harder to comply with than any voluntary agreements.

Boffins fed up with people getting their kit off on chat sites have developed a new algorithm that will allow sites to nip the nudity in the bud.

Video chat services such as Chatroulette which randomly link the webcams of people who visit the site have been doing well but it has been plagued by people who want to show their genitals. Of course these are usually sad gits, but the cry has gone up “what about the children” who need to be protected from the sight of other people's genitals.

Now Xinyu Xing at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a few pals have come up with a "flasher detection" algorithm that spots the offenders, allowing them to be kicked out. Spotting flashers is harder than it might appear particularly when you have 20,000 users on the site at any time.

Another approach is to use existing algorithms designed to detect pornographic content. Exactly how these algorithms work isn't entirely clear, but they appear to look for skin content in images. But this does not work very well because videos are often poorly lit making it hard to distinguish skin from yellowy-white walls in the background.

Xing and his chums have come up with a new algorithm, called SafevChat. It analyses the images using several different criteria and then fuses the results before deciding whether the image is acceptable or not.

One of the tricks is to see that the skin is moving. It uses face, eye and nose detectors to distinguish facial from non-facial skin.Chatroulette began using it on its website earlier this month.

There will probably be those who feel that the lack of genitals on the site make it suffer a bit.

The Glorious French Republic, which was founded on the idea of liberty and chopping off the head of your King and Queen, has decided that it would be a good idea to censor the world wide wibble. Section 4 of the Loppsi bill was adopted and will allow the ,government to filter the Internet using a blacklist issued by the Ministry of Interior.

The list will not get looked at by the courts and could contain any site that the government does not like. While the government has promised that the blacklisted sites will only contain child porn and sites connected to terrorism it is unlikely that governments will be able to resist using it to silence internal descent.

The opposition have been against the Loppsi Bill and are strongly opposed to Internet filtering. However they have to fight against government claims that they are in favour of kiddie porn. Eric Ciotti one of the bills supporters said he does not understand why anyone would be against the law. It should be pointed out that Wikileaks would be one of the sites filtered out.

Of course there is the small problem that internet blacklists when tested overseas have been failures at stopping anyone. All they have managed is stuffing up the internet for those who would not be looking at child porn.